omg facebook traffic declines?!?!? not exactly

October 10, 2007 – 8:35 pm

Om Malik, a rising Facebook hater (likely a reaction to the over the top lovefest that tends to invade the valley from time to time -even if in the long run the love fest is right it can be a little much), pens a dismissive post pointing to comscore’s september numbers.  Here’s the graphic Om links to:

But unfortunately Om falls into the fallacy of a single source and even more importantly the fallacy of Comscore numbers.  Anyone who has published a website knows that Comscore numbers aren’t that reliable.  They woefully under report traffic and skew demographically compared to internal stats and user surveys.  Since comscore relies on a downloaded app/toolbar they potentially have a skewed audience.  Comscore is a far from perfect source.

But to keep things fair let’s compare comscore to the other toolbar web traffic guys – Alexa:

 

Unfortunately we’re still waiting for Quantcast and my buddy Dave Cancel’s former company – Compete to release their September numbers.   And once I get a link to Dave Morin’s slides he showed at Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns conference – his graph for traffic shows no such decline.

  • aline
    Hi! I’ve found another site valuation tool and it seems to provide competitive analysis for free. I'm talking about www.estimix.com .The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.
  • Now, now - the point is that to get all high and mighty based on a crappy comscore report when likely the other crappy sources show something different means no meaningful conclusion can be drawn. Om is baiting his Furby loving brethren - but before the meme gets started that the sky is falling, let's make sure the sky is actually falling. Remember chicken little was hit by a nut not the sky ;-)
  • Allen Stern
    wait - so you are saying comscore isn't reliable but you are willing to accept compete, quantcast and alexa? :-P
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